


Bedmates

by jaythewriter



Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Loss, M/M, Multi, Relationship Problems, Trans Male Character, bereavement
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-08
Updated: 2015-04-08
Packaged: 2018-03-21 23:18:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3707199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaythewriter/pseuds/jaythewriter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alex Kralie's bed holds many secrets, as many secrets as he keeps inside of his head.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bedmates

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings for blood, mentioned death, and content warning for implied sex.

“You need to learn how to relax.”

Long nailed hands, kneading raised shoulders. Easing them down, pushing, until they pop back up, spring-loaded and insistent. Sigh, rinse, repeat.

“Keeping this much tension in your shoulders isn’t going to do anything good for your neck, you know.”

A gentle voice, from far away, though it sits right beside your ear. Safe. Full of promise. Familiarity. Your memories fail you these days. Patchy, coming up blank, chunks of time bitten out by a beastly jaw. 

When it comes to this place, laying beside her, peering to the window with lacy curtains she picked out and being certain nothing will be looking back in at you, your memory is constant. 

“How about you breathe with me? Think that’ll help?”

Strong hands fall from your body. You wish your certainty of mind flowed into a certainty of heart. 

Her heart presses against your back, those hands are on your softening stomach, and she commands you: breathe. You can never tell her no, not when you would have to explain why breathing will not work, why you have nightmares that rip you into sitting up in bed and screaming for mercy of death. 

She breathes. She exists. You exist with her, and breathe as well, filling her hands with your life.

“Good boy. Let go slow.”

(You have only ever known how to let go fast, hard, rip yourself from the picture, you never were here-- burn your image.)

You let go. Slow. As she commands.

\--

“I can’t do this anymore!”

Broken. Sitting. Dying. Blood. Your blood. You hope it’s yours.

“Every night, /every night/! You tell me not to worry, but then you come home like this and, and, what the fuck am I supposed to think?!”

A voice. Her voice. From the bathroom. Hollow and echoing. Water hisses, aware of your sins, sneering at your filthy soul. Guilt. Tired. Sleep is not an option.

Liars are filthy and you are filthy and you may never find solace. Not in the wildly beating organ inside your chest. Not in the film that lays within your camera, static dancing upon the tearing frames. Not in the person you love most, screaming into the sink and sobbing sobbing sobbing, you did that.

You.

“I love you, Alex! You have to tell me what’s going on! We don’t keep secrets!”

Never agreed on what to do when something must be kept secret. Needs to be locked up, chained, tied down, curtains drawn around it. Must be secret, must be safe, have to be kept safe to stay safe.

The water calms, and it falls silent. Blood drips. Drop shaped. Then designs, beautiful flowers blooming in your lap. Red as roses. Roses. You could bring her roses. Apologize. Promise to be better when you will never be better.

One more lie on top of the rest. What is one more lie?

She sobs. Sobs sobs sobs. Your fault.

“Please, Alex… I know you can hear me. I know you can hear me crying, why are you just sitting out there ignoring me, please, please, Alex, tell me what’s happened, why are you /bleeding/…”

(You would tell her. If you knew. You remember leaving. Camera in hand. Flashlight guiding the way. Drawn to trees. Your tall companions, they do not speak words, but they do speak.)

(Come, they said, come see what we have to show you.)

(What did they bring to you, these trees? You can only guess, but you have a good guess, for sure. A dark creature, a being, one that parodies the look of a human being while bearing no grin but you know it is grinning, laughing at you.)

Here you are now. Blood. Dripping. Lips coated. Nostrils bearing a drying painful crust of the red. 

The bones in your nose are not broken. Nothing hurts. There is nothing there to be feeling pain. You are nothing.

She sobs, sobs, sobs.

Your fault.

It’s all your fault.

\--

(“You’re a push-over, Alex,” your best friend tells you, though his words are fitted around a smile. He glances at the six-pack of Budweiser in your arms and shakes his head. “You don’t have to buy beer just to get into the party. Forget what those assholes said. My word is law; you’re in, don’t worry about it.”)

(You clutch the glass bottles close when he turns his back to you, flipping up his yellow hood and stepping into the house. He means well, trying to stick up for you, but you’re going to slip these to the host and hope maybe this won’t be the last time you get invited over. And next time, you won’t have to buy your way in with your age and ID.)

“What were you dreaming about?”

There isn’t a woman next to you in bed. There hasn’t been for a long time now. 

It is your fault. But you don’t want to be the one to admit that.

Instead, there is a pair of blue eyes peeking up at you from beneath the covers. Blue, blue, blue, a newborn kitten’s eyes, a pup’s. Still shy, just as shy as they were earlier, asking for permission to cross the threshold of your new hideout-- not home, like some might call this place, not apartment as it says on the ugly chipping sign out front, no. 

Hiding hole.

“…Brian,” you tell those eyes. You do not know why you tell him the truth. You’re breaking the habit you’ve made of twisting your words when speaking to him, in some fucked up effort to keep him at arm’s length. Earlier tonight, you told him you were off to make dinner when you just went and smoked out on the balcony. No reason. It felt right to keep the truth in your hands alone.

Covers shift and fall over his naked waist. You avert your fogged gaze. Polite. Strange, considering those are your fingerprints marking his pale hips, the shadow of your mouth upon his skinny neck. Maybe it is instinct, remembering how he told you to look away in the years before, when he was picking out the baggiest outfits he owned and attempting to match them. 

“You were shifting a lot before, I was awake but I didn’t wanna say anything,” he admits. His long fingers inch across the bedspread, chilled skin too near to yours, but not quite there, not quite touching. “Guess it was a nightmare?”

Your shoulders bob, forming something like a shrug. Once upon a time, it might have been a nightmare. That craving, that need for somebody to like him, he would choose that any day over this. Being chased. Being uncertain.

(uncertainty is your life. a bottomless pit, the earth swept out from beneath you, pulled by sneering faces and now a lack of one. do they actually want you around? what does it want of you?)

“I don’t remember a lot about Brian.”

This shitty mattress was not build for two bodies. It’s lucky he weighs all of one hundred pounds, even if he insists he is more. You press closer to the wall at your right, hugging it with all your might.

“He was a great guy. Even if he didn’t have a reason to be helping you out or something, he’d be there anyway.”

“That sounds right,” your bed companion mutters into the hands he brings to rub his face. “I remember him smiling a lot and everyone wanted to fuck him. I think I wanted to.”

You snort. He’s right. Even you, picky as you are, not one to chase guys who are physically stronger than you… well, funny things happen when you’ve had a few tokes.

“Thanks for letting me stay tonight.”

Any sense of calm you had gained in the last moment drains. You know better. You know he should not be here. You should be out there as well, finding others like him, others you touched, others that the true cause has bumped elbows with.

You could not resist the prospect of company, though, when you have had none in so long, and apparently, neither could he. Temptation is a disgusting creature and it laughs in your face. 

Maybe you have not changed as much as you thought. What is left to change, though? If nothing is there, there is nothing present, nothingness has no traits and therefore it cannot be changed.

Are you thinking too hard about this or are you tired?

Both, most likely. 

“Alex?”

“Hm?”

The man rolls onto his side, skin grey in this lightless room. He gazes at you, a suspicious frown playing on his lips.

“…why did you refer to Brian in the past tense?”

You shake your head and pull the covers up to your neck, drowning his smaller form underneath in your collective heat.

“I didn’t do that. You must’ve misheard me.”

“No, Alex, I didn’t--”

“Don’t tell me what I did or didn’t say,” you snap, and he’s quiet after that. 

\--

A bare mattress, full of memories that do not belong to anyone that still walks, talks, breathes. 

A coverless pillow, bearing the indent of a head that will no longer come and visit.

Shambles of a school, falling down around it, rotting, eating away at itself, a slow and painful death.

Spots of blood, on the pillow, the ground surrounding the makeshift bed, upon a bent knife swept underneath a pile of filthy clothes, stinking of fear.

Notebooks, some of them scrounged from desks, others bought in months gone past, scattered upon the floor.

Evidence that there was life-- but there is life no more.

No sound, except for the wind singing a quiet ditty into the window, whistling and hissing. No sound, until a something rattles from beneath the pillow. Shaking, muttering, begging for the attention of a man that is no longer there to answer.

A phone creeps out into the open, its vibrations shaking it about until it topples off of the mattress and catches the corner of it against its dusty screen. The accidental touch swipes the icon upon it just the right way, answering the caller on the other side. 

“…what the hell?”

One man’s voice amongst the stillness, unrecognized, unheard. Shuffling sounds, from the speaker, then a second more of astonished quiet.

“Alex?”

The name falls, and strikes against nothing.

“Alex, are you-- you can’t be there, can you. You were. Uh. Bleeding. Really badly. The last time I saw you, that is.”

The newest of the drying blood is not actually new, merely the most recent to fall from the lips of a broken man. Dry, crusting, brown, disgusting, one could chip it off the dust-coated floor using their fingernails, if they were so curious.

“Are you there?”

As though to answer, the building creaks, settling into its faulty foundation.

“Is anyone there…? I-- of course not. This is a fluke. It’s gotta be.”

No creaking. No wind. Nothing. He is alone as he feels.

“Okay-- this is stupid. But, Alex, I found Jay’s phone, and he had his parents’ number, your number, and mine. Something probably happened to his parents, their line was disconnected. I don’t know why I called yours, it’s not like, uh, I, I knew you weren’t going to pick up.”

The voice pauses, as though in thought. Spirits gone past hold their non-breath, if there are spirits to be found here. As much death as this place as seen, as much youthful energy and hope as it once held, something must be there. 

(Something must be listening. Someone.)

(Please?)

“Is it weird, hoping you’d pick up? So I could… I don’t know what I want to do. I want you to tell you something but I don’t know what. I guess, sorry. Maybe. I didn’t want it to end up like this, Alex.”

The phone utters a pained cry. An emptying battery flashes on the screen.

“I’m s--”

One more time; the speakers struggle to let out a dying beep, and no longer than a second later, the last thing to hold life sputters out.


End file.
